printed version in: Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical
Problems of Online Education. A Special Issue of The Journal of Philosophy
of Education, edited by Paul Standish und Nigel Blake, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000,
pp. 53-69.

Mike Sandbothe

Media Philosophy and Media Education in the Internet Age

When, as a philosopher, you concern yourself with
issues of media theory, you are often confronted with the largely rhetorical
question as to what philosophy has to do with media. That logical, ethical,
aesthetic, and epistemological issues, or questions concerning the philosophy
of science and of language, are genuine philosophical questions seems self-evident
to us today. The neologisms ‘philosophical media theory’ or ‘media philosophy’,
however, sound unaccustomed, irritating, suspect. To some they may even appear
to be a contradictio in adjecto.
In the following considerations I would like to demonstrate that in the conditions
of the transformation of media currently taking place it is important and
meaningful to construe the question of media as a philosophical question.
My considerations are organized in three sections. In the first section some
fundamental sets of media-educational problems with regard to the Internet
will be outlined, to whose solution media-philosophical reflections can make
an essential contribution. In the second section two different conceptions
of the currently evolving discipline of media philosophy will be introduced.
Finally, in the third section, it will be shown how these conceptions, if
they are sensibly combined with one another, could make a fundamental theoretical
contribution to the clarification of important problems arising today in a
media-educational perspective.

The Challenges to Media Education through the Current Media Transformation

A transition is currently taking place from an
educational culture shaped by the printed word and spoken speech to a form
of educational practice in which working in the Internet’s multimedia environment
assumes central importance. This transition
puts in question four idealised basic assumptions in the self-understanding
of traditionalist education. The first basic assumption is that the knowledge to be conveyed in schools
and universities is to be localised, detached from its concrete contexts of
use and relocated in a specifically academic realm of theoretical knowledge
transfer. The second basic assumption
is that lessons are to take place as communication among people who are present.
The voice here appears as the distinguished medium of an educational transfer
process which is conceived of as face-to-face communication. Within the framework
of this process – according to the third basic assumption – teachers are
vested with the authority of omnicompetent knowledge administrators. They
play the role of living encyclopaedias, they speak as if in print, and have
a preordained pigeon-hole, a binding definition and a fixed evaluation to
hand for every question and every piece of knowledge. The fourth basic assumption follows from the preceding three. It relates
to the structure of the knowledge that is to be taught or learned. In the
conditions of traditional educational culture this knowledge is understood
as a stock of established facts, standing in a hierarchically arranged context
of order, and is represented paradigmatically by the institution of the library
catalogue system.

In the context of debates on educational philosophy
throughout the 20th century, all four assumptions have been repeatedly discussed
and partially problematised from varying perspectives. Nonetheless they may
be considered as the implicit guidelines for actual educational practice in
most schools and universities in the USA and Europe. Under the influence of
the media transformation that is currently taking place, it is practice iself
which problematises the basic assumptions mentioned above, and in a sense
directly relevant to school and university. Once educational activities reorient
themselves to the dynamics of knowledge itself, as found in the new medium
of the Internet, educators begin to need a more experimental understanding
of their own practice, within whose framework they can scrutinise the basic
assumptions of an educational culture shaped by the world of the printed book
and oral culture.

The first
of the four reconstructed basic assumptions of traditional educational culture
– the notion of a closed realm of theoretical knowledge – is put in question
in the open semiotic world of the Internet in two ways. This occurs, on the
one hand, with regard to the physical space of knowledge, literally the classroom
or seminar room. As soon as teachers begin to incorporate the Internet into
work with students or pupils, the school class or seminar group enters a virtual
space that transcends the limits of the class or seminar room. On the other
hand, there are alterations in the symbolic knowledge space brought about
by this transcending of borders. The complex networked character and unobservable
intertwinements of theoretical knowledge, as well as its pragmatic binding
to practical contexts of usage, clearly come into view in the light of the
experience in the Internet (cf. Sandbothe, 1996).

The second
basic assumption of traditional educational culture also becomes problematic
with the use of the Internet in education. In conditions of Internet-oriented
teaching and learning, face-to-face communication no longer appears to be
distinguished in some particular way as the model or paradigm of the educational
communication situation. Rather, synchronous and asynchronous communications
possibilities between people who are not present come along, in the form of
mailing lists, news boards, IRC, MUDs and MOOs, assuming equal value with
conversation between people who are present and relativising its traditional
primacy as the paradigm for the mediation of sense and meaning. The experiences
of computer-mediated communication have a twofold feedback effect on face-to-face
communication itself – on the one side decentralising, on the other revalidating
it.

This has consequences for the third basic assumption. The incorporation
of the Internet into lessons leads to a transformation of the educational
communicative structure that furthermore affects the inner constitution of
the face-to-face conversational relationship of conventional lessons. This
happens in the form of decentralisation, such that teachers no longer stand
at the hub of the learning situation as omnicompetent knowledge administrators.
The restrictedness and short half-life of the teacher’s individual knowledge
stock is immediately made clear to the students through the Internet’s collective
knowledge network. This calls into question the traditional legitimation of
the teacher’s authority and the classical structure of direct lessons. Teachers
no longer appear to be sovereign administrators of a hierarchically organized
framework of knowledge, which is to be imparted in a direct teaching situation.
Instead, faced with the ‘information overload’ manifested on the Internet,
they acquire new educational responsibilities for evaluation and communicatively
pragmatic navigational tasks.

The notion of a hierarchically structured framework
of knowledge is also questioned by the Internet, and with this the fourth basic assumption of traditional
educational culture. In its place we find the experience of a hypertexually
networked, interactively evolving and potentially infinite referential context
of graphical, pictorial and acoustic signs. No intrinsic order or immanent
systematism is discernible which would unite these data to a comprehensive
bibliographical knowledge cosmos, such as had shaped the world of ideas of
the Gutenberg age. Instead there is a continually increasing demand on users
to introduce order to the data chaos themselves, relying on reflexive judgement
and using the corresponding net tools (bookmarks, search engines, intelligent
agents etc.). Knowledge is changing from supposedly being an objectively pregiven
stock of intrinsically ordered facts to a constantly changing artefact of
intersubjectively mediated judgement. It proves to be a process, open to constant
revision, and in whose realisation the skills of associative networking, independent
evaluation and pragmatic coupling to individual and collective interest are
foremost.

How can the foundational principles of an Internet-oriented
educational culture be developed in the light of the transformations described?
How is one to secure the continued commitment of this new culture to the democratic
ideals of political Enlightenment, whilst improving and extending the conditions
for realising that commitment? How is the realm of educational knowledge to
be conceived when we no longer apprehend it as a closed academic realm of
theoretical representation of knowledge, which cognitively mirrors or constructs
reality? How is educational communication to be understood when it is no longer
to be characterized by the priority of spoken language and the guiding function
of face-to-face conversation? How is the altered constitution of the authority
of teachers to be described, when teachers can no longer be legitimated as
opaque arbiters of selection and authoritative evaluation, personalising a
preordained canon of knowledge in an institution-specific manner, and making
this appear as an ordered and examinable system of factual matters? And finally,
in what new way is the structure of knowledge itself to be understood in the
changed media conditions? What is knowledge if it is not a system of hierarchically
ordered facts? How do sense and meaning come about in a networked world in
which there is no Archimedean point of reference, no ultimate reference text,
no uniform systematism?

It is the task of media philosophy to respond
to fundamental theoretical questions of this type, which form the point of
departure for the development of media education in the Internet age. Media
philosophy has to develop concepts which can help provide answers and open
new horizons of action. Until now media philosophy has hardly any standing
as an independent discipline within the framework of academic philosophy.
But both in Europe and the USA there are a multitude of endeavours suggesting
that this will change in the future. In the following pages, I will be concerned
to move on from already existing departure points for the development of a
contemporary media philosophy, and to relate these to one another in a productive
manner such that fundamental philosophical principles for an Internet-oriented
educational culture can be developed.

To this end I will draw upon two differing conceptions
of media philosophy which at first glance appear heterogeneous and incompatible:
theoreticist and pragmatist conceptions of media philosophy. Both emerge from
philosophical camps that determine contemporary thinking in a decisive manner.
The theoreticist conception of media philosophy was developed by Jacques Derrida
in the framework of his deconstructionism. The basic ideas of the pragmatist
conception of media philosophy have their origin in the work of the founder
of neopragmatism, Richard Rorty, including Rorty’s pragmatist reinterpretation
of Donald Davidson, the avant-garde thinker of analytic philosophy.1

Derrida’s deconstructionist media philosophy can
help us to understand that the current media transformation does not undermine
the constitution of sense and meaning, but rather allows the laws already
valid for face-to-face communication to become transparent. Against this background
the American computer sociologist Sherry Turkle has spoken of the way in which
the Internet brings basic ideas of philosophical deconstruction ‘down to earth’
(Turkle, 1995, p. 17). By this is meant that through the forms of communication
characteristic of the Internet, the epistemological insights and intuitions
of deconstructionism are increasingly becoming an implicit constituent of
common sense. To get to the bottom of the media philosophical significance
of these transformations taking place at the level of our everyday epistemology,
it is helpful to review the media-philosophical essence of Derrida’s thinking.

The same applies to the media-philosophical implications
of the neopragmatism founded by Rorty. The Internet not only allows sense
and meaning to appear in a different epistemological light. At the same time,
our dealings with interactive data-networks also lead to a reassessment of
the status and the function of sense and meaning itself. Knowledge no longer
appears primarily to be a copy or construction of a reality that is to be
cognized, but turns out in its pragmatic function to be a tool for the active
and experimental changing of reality and shaping of the world. With recourse
to Davidson, Rorty has suggested trying to understand our theories and vocabularies
as means that serve to optimise our interaction with our environment in an
intelligent manner. As the goal on the horizon for this interaction, he emphasizes
the idea of a gradual improvement and extension of the democratic form of
life, which for us today is binding precisely on account of its contingency.
Both aspects of Rorty’s neopragmatism make an important contribution to the
reconstruction of the media-philosophical transformations that are taking
shape at the common sense level in the Internet age.

In the following pages, I will demonstrate how
the deconstructionist constitution of sense and meaning on the one side, and
the pragmatic-political project of democratic Enlightenment on the other are
to be conceived of as fitting together. To this end, the varying conceptions
of media philosophy which can be reconstructed with recourse to Derrida on
one side and Rorty on the other will first of all be introduced in more detail.

Media Philosophy between Theoreticism and Pragmatism

In the context of contemporary media-philosophical
reflections, we can distinguish two different conceptions of media philosophy.
On one side, media philosophy is apprehended as a new fundamental discipline
within the canon of academic philosophy, linking onto the foundational projects
formulated in the 19th and 20th centuries by epistemology, philosophy of science,
and analytic philosophy. On the other, the project of media philosophy is
linked with a new orientation of philosophical self-understanding that Rorty
has called the ‘pragmatic turn’ (Rorty, 1979, p. 149). By this is meant the
transition to a form of philosophical activity whose focus is no longer the
theoreticist question of the representational or constructivist reference
of our linguistic cognitive achievements to reality, but instead the pragmatic
question of the utility of our thinking in contexts of action, contexts to
be determined morally, politically and socially. Both conceptions of media
philosophy can be reconstructed by reference to their relation to the ‘linguistic
turn’ (Bergmann, 1954, p. 106 passim; cf. also Rorty, 1967) taken by modern
philosophy in the twentieth century.

The central claim of the theoreticist conception
undercuts the linguistic turn by media-theoretical considerations, and sets
it on deeper foundations. Two foundational movements can be distinguished:
one horizontal and one vertical. The horizontal undercuts the linguistic turn by placing a plurality of
pictorial, graphic, tactile, motoric, acoustic and other semiotic systems
on an equal footing with spoken language, itself the focus of linguistic philosophising.
These systems are presented as other and further dimensions of mediative constitution
of meaning. The vertical foundational
movement undercuts the linguistic turn by consideration of the material constitution
of the media-based sign systems in which human beings generate meaning and
interpret reality, a material constitution obscured by linguistic philosophers.
Both strategies for a media-philosophical deepening of the linguistic turn
can be paradigmatically illustrated using the example of Jacques Derrida’s
Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1997;
French original: 1967).

I will begin with the vertical foundational movement.
The basic critical thesis of Derrida’s major early work relates to the special
status spoken language has always implicitly enjoyed in occidental thinking,
eventually quite explicitly in the enactment of the linguistic turn in philosophy.
On Derrida’s view. the upshot is the thesis, a thesis to be media-theoretically
problematised, of the philosophical priority of spoken language. Speech has
this priority because of the specific materiality or, better, the supposed
immateriality of that medium in which speech takes place. In his analysis
of the medium of the voice, Derrida proceeds in two steps. Each of these two
steps thematises a different aspect of the mediative materiality of spoken
language. The first step is concerned with its obviously phonic character,
the second with its hidden written signature.

To highlight the specific peculiarity of the phonic
character of spoken language, Derrida emphasises that when we articulate a
sentence, we not only externalise what is said as a message for a partner
in communication, but always hear and understand the articulated sentence
ourselves too. Derrida calls this phenomenon, characteristic of the human
voice, a ‘system of “hearing (understanding)-oneself-speaking”’ (Derrida,
1997, p. 7). According to Derrida, occidental philosophy’s one-sided orientation
towards the phenomenology of this system means that the medium of ‘phonic
substance’ in which speech takes place appears ‘as the nonexterior, nonmundane,
therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier’ (ibid., p. 7f.). In this
interpretation however, the actual externalisation – which occurs not only
in the act of communication addressed to a conversational partner, but in
the very instance of hearing and understanding oneself speak – is blended
out, replaced by hypostatisation of an inner and immediate presence of meaning.
This hypostatisation, criticised by Derrida as ‘phonocentric’ (ibid., p.12f.),
systematically obscures the mediative complexity that is proper to human speech.
The second step of the vertical foundational movement reveals this complexity
by displaying spoken language’s hidden written signature.

'Phonocentrism' implies a degradation of writing
as a supplementary ‘signifier of the signifier’ or a tertiary ‘sign of a sign’
(ibid., pp. 7, 43). In these conditions the written sign is understood as
a merely technical representation of the phonic sign that itself is understood
as closely related to a supposed media neutral realm of pure meaning. Derrida
takes this phonocentric definition of writing, and uses it in a deconstructionist
manner as a model for the functioning of spoken language itself.
On this basis one obtains a ‘modification of the concept of writing’
which Derrida speaks of as ‘generalized writing’ or ‘arche-writing’ (ibid.,
pp. 55, 55, 56). ‘Arche-writing’ denotes a semiotic (referential) structure,
in which the sense of any sign – and therefore the sense of the spoken word
as well, the meaning of logos –
is a function of its relation to other signs taken as signs of signs of signs
etc. (without any reference to a media neutral domain of pure meaning). This
relational semiotic referential structure, which Derrida also calls ‘différance’
(cf. Derrida, 1982), at the same time serves for him as the point of departure
for the second, horizontal foundational movement.

According to Derrida the word ‘writing’ is used
in contemporary thinking ‘to designate not only the physical gestures of literal
pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes
it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself.
And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general,
whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien
to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also
pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing”’ (ibid., p. 9). The internal logic
and independence of the pictorial, graphic, tactile, motoric, acoustic and
other semiotic systems, but also their equal primordiality and intertwining,
are the focus of the 'horizontal' move which Derrida carries out, after having
deepened 'vertically' the linguistic turn. Both moves undercut phonocentrism
by deciphering the conditions of possibility for the constitution of meaning
as the interplay of differences – an interplay due to the formal figure of
différance, which in itself
has no meaning, since it results from the material contingency of those media
in which and as which it occurs.

I call the problem area taken up and further developed
in a deconstructionist manner by Derrida ‘theoreticist’ because it abstracts
from all concrete contexts of interest
and all determinate targets set
by human communities. The theoreticist demarcation of the tasks of media philosophy
addresses the constitution of our understanding of both self and the world,
and hence a domain beyond all practical horizons of utility, a domain that
is supposed to produce, found or legitimize those horizons. In contrast to
this theoreticist version, the pragmatist definition of the tasks of media
philosophy emerges from culturally and historically given practical contexts
of interest and socio-political targets. This can be illustrated by taking
as examples selected considerations set out by Richard Rorty, the American
figurehead of neopragmatism.2

Unlike Derrida, Rorty is not concerned with the
deconstructionist deepening of the
linguistic turn. Instead, following on from Donald Davidson, Rorty takes the
linguistic turn more as an occasion for a change of subject and a side-stepping
of the issues of the epistemological tradition in their linguistic reformulation.
He does this by developing a pragmatic vocabulary (cf. Rorty, 1991b). In the
conditions of the linguistic turn as further developed by Quine and Sellars,
linguistic competence was apprehended as the ability to form content, and
hence to individuate things and identify them, within a differentially structured
and holistically conceived conceptual network, or semiotic scheme. Davidson
confronts this view with the provocative thesis that ‘there is no such thing
as a language’ Davidson, 1996, p. 475).
This radical implication follows from Davidson’s rejection of the ‘dualism
of scheme and content, of organising system and something waiting to be organized’
(Davidson, 1984, p. 189). According to Davidson this dualism can be traced
back to Kant. It underlies not only the different readings of the linguistic
turn from Carnap and Bergmann through to Quine and Sellars, but is even
presupposed in Derrida’s general semiotics of différance.
Against this Davidson suggests erasing the ‘boundary between knowing a language
and knowing our way around in the world generally’ (Davidson, 1996, p. 475)
and ‘thinking of language as a kind of know-how’ (Rorty, 1994, p. 976), i.e.
as a collection of pragmatic instruments allowing us to interact with other
people and the non-human environment.

Following Davidson, Rorty pleads in favour of
an instrumental concept of media. Media are not, however, to be reduced to
neutral tools in the mere transmission of pre-existing information, as in
the phonocentric tradition criticised by Derrida. Rather, the determination
of the function of media is extended beyond the narrow realm (specific to
theoreticism) of the conditions of possibility of knowledge to the wider realm
of human action. In this sense Rorty emphasizes: ‘For even if we agree that
languages are not media of representation [of external reality – M.S.] or
expression [of inner reality – M.S.], they will remain media of communication,
tools for social interaction, ways of tying oneself up with other human beings’
(Rorty, 1989, p. 41). Human action is understood by Rorty in the practical
and political terms of the goods and aspirations according to which people
in the Western democracies have learned increasingly to organise their public
conduct in the last two hundred years, in spite of all relapses. These goods
and aspirations are the socio-political ideals characteristic of the Enlightenment’s
political project, those of an increase of solidarity and a decrease of cruelty
and humiliation in human coexistence (cf. here and in the sequel Rorty, 1991;
1994b, esp. pp. 67-89; 1998b).

Against the contingent, but for us today increasingly
binding background of Euro-American liberalism, the pragmatist determination
of the tasks of media philosophy answers to the efforts of democratic societies
‘to incorporate ever more people in their own society’ (Rorty, 1994b, p. 80).
In order to increase solidarity and decrease cruelty and humiliation, there
is no need for a profound philosophical moral justification. For ‘the moral
development of the individual and the moral progress of the human species
as a whole is based on the reshaping of human selves so that the multitude
of relationships constitutive of these selves becomes ever more comprehensive’
(Rorty, 1994b, p. 76). In Rorty’s view the media play an important role in
the pragmatic implementation of this project of democratic universalisation.
Central to this is the practical efficacy of narrative media such as ‘the
novel, the movie, and the TV program’ (Rorty, 1989, p. xvi). Rorty is concerned
here primarily with the contents, the concrete narratives offered by the media.
They are to contribute to bringing forward the ‘process of coming to see other
human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them”(Rorty, 1989, p. xvi).

If one attempts to go beyond Rorty, making use
of his comments on media for an exacting conception of pragmatist media philosophy,
a modified view of the entire fabric of different types of media results.
The system of media in a broad sense comprises sensuous perceptive media (e.g.
space and time), semiotic communications media (e.g. images, language, writing
and music) as well as technical transmission media (e.g. print, radio, television
and the Internet).3
Whereas the emphasis of the linguistic, grammatological or picture-theoretical research
of theoreticist media theories is mostly in the realm of semiotic communications
media (or in the realm of spatio-temporal perceptive media), pragmatist media
philosophy accentuates the peripheral realm of technical transmission media.
From a pragmatist perspective, the media-political shaping of precisely this
outer realm proves to be the central point of departure for those who want
to foster long term changes in the realm of perceptive and communications
media.

The close definition of the relationship between
philosophy and politics expressed in these considerations takes a decisive
step beyond Rorty. In Rorty’s view the public-political sphere of technical
transmission media is to be sharply delineated from the esoteric vocabularies
of philosophy. Philosophical vocabularies are, according to Rorty, to be understood
as their author’s private self-creation projects, about whose relevance for
common sense little can be said. And if philosophical vocabularies do after
all find their way to the common man once in a while, which according to Rorty
can indeed happen in exceptional cases, then this takes place ‘in the long
run’ (Rorty, 1993, p. 445), that is, on the horizon of historical developments
which are to be measured on the temporal scale of centuries. In the age of
the new media technologies, corrections need to be made to this conservative
assessment of the meaning of philosophy. For, although Rorty
himself notes in the first chapter of Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity that the ‘process of European linguistic
practices changing at a faster and faster rate’(Rorty, 1989, p. 7), this in fact leads to faster and more radical transformation
of the philosophical fundaments of common sense than Rorty is prepared to
admit (cf. Sandbothe, 1998b, 2000c).

If one interprets the technical media of modernity
as machines with whose help whole societies can acquire new ways of perceptual
and semiotic worldmaking in relatively short time, then it becomes clear that
media-political issues have genuine philosophical dimensions and that philosophical
media theories have eminently political aspects. Although pragmatic media
philosophy in this exacting sense distances itself from the theoreticist programme
of providing philosophical foundations for our socio-political contexts of
action, this does not mean that it abstains from philosophical depth of focus
altogether. Rather than this abstention (suggested in Rorty’s plea for a ‘post-philosophical
culture’ (Rorty, 1982, p. XL)), it attempts to use the analytical instruments
made available by Derrida’s theoreticist media philosophy in a pragmatic fashion.
The project of a media philosophy that integrates the two approaches in this
way aims at making the media-induced alterations in common sense accessible
to experimental research. Thus, these mediative changes in our everyday epistemology
can be related to the political-practical purposes of a democratic shaping
of human coexistence. What this looks like in detail will now be demonstrated
paradigmatically, with regard to the media-educational questions set out at
the beginning.

The graphic user interface of the hypertextually
structured World Wide Web stands at the heart of the Internet today. The World
Wide Web is to be distinguished from the older Internet services, which are
linear textual applications and include services ranging from e-mail and Talk,
Net News and mailing lists, through to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), MUDs and
MOOs (see below and in Sandbothe 2000b). I will begin with linear textual
services and concentrate on the synchronous communications services of MUDs
and MOOs (cf. Rheingold, 1993). MUD is the abbreviation for Multi User Dungeon,
which is a virtual gaming ‘haunt’. A number of participants log in simultaneously
to a fictional text-based game landscape in order to collect so-called ‘experience
points’ in combat with other players and programmed robots, and to advance
in the respective game’s hierarchy to being a ‘wizard’ or ‘god’. Wizards and
gods have the power to alter the game landscape and to program the problems
which the other participants must solve. MOO stands for Multi User Dungeon
Object Oriented, which – in contrast to the strictly hierarchically organized,
and sometimes quite violent, adventure MUDs – are games in which cooperation,
solidarity, education and science are central. Every participant receives
programming rights from the start, i.e. he or she can create rooms and objects
in the medium of writing and independently contribute to the shaping of the
text-based educational and game landscape.

The binding of writing to synchronous conversation
in one-to-one or many-to-many communication creates a pragmatic recontextualisation
of the use of writing in MUDs and MOOs. With the help of written signs, speech
acts are performed between people in MUDs and MOOs which it would be difficult
to carry out in the technical medium of print: people fall in love, make promises
to one another, argue with each other and make up again, laugh, cry, flirt
with each other, and do all those things that we can also do in face-to-face
communication or on the telephone. In the synchronous interpersonal communications
characteristic of MUDs and MOOs, writing does not serve exclusively, or even
primarily, to make descriptive statements or truth claims. Rather it is utilised
as an instrument for the coordination and execution of communal social activities.

In MUDs and MOOs even those actions which are
not speech acts in the classical sense, but actions which in real life we
would apprehend as non-linguistic actions, are also carried out in the mode
of writing. This is because in interactive writing, as a form of communication
which is restricted to the medium of writing, it is only that which takes
place as a written act that functions as real communication. My smile only
becomes present in a MUD or MOO when I write the sentence ‘Mike smiles’ or
the equivalent emoticon ‘:-)’. (An emoticon is a graphic device combining
simple punctuation marks in conventoional combinations, to express simple
emotions non-verbally in text on the Internet.)
The same applies when I drink a beer in a virtual bar or sit on the
desk in the virtual office of a colleague in MIT’s Media MOO. In all these
cases, it is irrelevant whether some independent reality is represented by
the letters I type in. It doesn’t matter whether I’m really smiling, really
drinking a beer, really sitting on the desk, or if I merely construct these
actions. Rather what matters is that, by formulating these sentences online,
I carry out actions in the respective MUD or MOO, that is, modify the conversational
situation through my actions.

The pragmatisation of our sign usage that is taking
place in the Internet becomes even clearer when we turn to the hypertextual
constitution of the World Wide Web. It is characteristic of hypertexts that
they point to intertextual references not merely in the mode of footnotes,
but by using active links which make these references constituent parts of
those texts. The idea of a closed meaningful content, already suggested at
the material level by the closed unit of a manuscript bound between two book
covers, is made problematic by the hypertextual constitution of textual elements
presented and interconnected with one another in the Internet. The positive
side of this change, in hypertextuality, consists in the explicit and technically
manifest opening of signs to other signs and to virtual as well as real actions.
In the hypertextual World Wide Web, letters and graphical signs become programmable.
Pragmatically, signifiers, as icons, generate, with a mouse-click, no longer
a merely symbolic, but a real connection to what they designate. So in the
digital bookstore Amazon.com, a click on the button with the inscription ‘Buy
1 Now With 1 Click’ suffices and - assuming that I am registered with address
and credit card number as a customer on the server -
I immediately receive the following answer: ‘Thank you for your 1-Click
order! (Yes, it was that easy.) One copy of the book you ordered will be sent
to you as soon as possible.’

Of course the fact that we can order books through
the exchange of written signs is not a distinguishing characteristic of the
World Wide Web. We can also carry out such an ordering process by post or
fax. The distingushing feature is that, through the Web, the pragmatic dimension
of our use of writing is made explicit and salient by the immediate answer
which our order elicits in an interactive system. This brings me to an important
point, which I might not have highlighted clearly enough until now: Of almost
all the properties distinguishing our sign usage in the Internet as something
particular in relation to our everyday, non-digital sign usage, it can be
said that these properties are in no way things radically new, but rather
that they make explicit and vivid things which happen implicitly and unconsciously
in everyday sign usage. In summary one can say, with recourse to Derrida and
Rorty, that against the background of pragmatic embedment of sign usage in
the Internet, the deconstructionist constitution of sense and meaning appears
as directly ratifiable and evident, while it would otherwise be systematically
concealed by the presence of voice and the (derivative) authority of the printed
word. How can the transformations being experienced by the basic assumptions
of traditional educational culture in the Internet, as reconstructed at the
beginning of this paper, be redescribed against this background?

In an Internet-oriented educational culture, the
first basic assumption of the givenness
of a closed academic realm of theoretical knowledge representation is replaced
by the deconstruction of academic knowledge spaces (cf. Ulmer, 1985). De-construction
has two aspects, one destructive, one constructive. The destructive aspect
is emancipation from the fixedness of the educational communication process
in the world of the classroom or seminar room. With the integration of the
Internet into the educational process, the virtual world opens up as a space
of shared learning. This opening at the same time constitutes the constructive
aspect. In the design of a university’s or school’s own MOO, or in working
together on a seminar’s or a school class’s own homepage, learners experience
the learning space in a quite literal sense as the product of their cooperative
imagination and collective design capabilities.

These self-designed and permanently evolving knowledge
spaces can at the same time be networked with other knowledge spaces and virtual,
as well as real, action spaces. In this way possibilities for transcultural
communication are revealed which contribute to the realisation of learning
in a transnational context. On the Internet, it becomes possible for students
and learners who are spatially and geographically separated from each other,
and to this extent live in different worlds, to live together virtually in
a common world whose basic spatio-temporal coordinates they can cooperatively
construct in a deliberative process of negotiation. In this way, globality
as a form of life becomes tangible and ingrained as a basic everyday attitude
in a playful, matter-of-course manner. Furthermore, on the level of everyday
epistemology, the deconstruction of academic knowledge spaces leads to a conscious
awareness of the interpretive and constructive nature of our experiences of
space and time. The recognition that come with this, of the contingent character
of even our deepest convictions and epistemological intuitions, represents
a further important basis for transcultural dialogue which is concerned precisely
with the intertwining of contingent convictions and supposedly self-evident
intuitions of different origins.

The second
basic assumption of traditional educational culture is also deconstructed
by the incorporation of the Internet. In this case, the destructive aspect
consists in the fact that voice-centred face-to-face conversation no longer
functions as the dominant paradigm of the educational communication process.
Instead, interactive writing undergoes a characteristic revaluation. In Internet
conditions, writing no longer functions – as in the printed book – solely
as a medium of knowledge storage, but (in MUDs, MOOs and IRC) becomes useable
interactively as a synchronous medium of communication. The constructive aspect
is that in interactively writing a conversation, we experience the constitution
of sense and meaning as always mediated by signs which themselves refer to
other signs (as signs of signs of signs etc.). In this way the inner written
signature of our thought and communication becomes immediately ratifiable.
Common sense changes. Under the influence of the Internet, our everyday epistemology
is becoming increasingly deconstructionist.

This applies not only to our use of alphabetic
writing, but also to our use of pictures. If one considers the internal data
structure of digital pictures, then it becomes clear that in terms of their
technical structure, images composed of pixels have the character of ‘writing’
in Derrida’s sense. By using editor programs, the elements of the digital
image can be exchanged, shifted and altered, just as the letters of a system of writing can be. Images thus become
flexible scripts which can be editted. In the digital mode, the image loses
its distinguished status as a representation or construction of reality. It
proves to be a technological work of art whose semiotics arise internally
from the relations between pixels and externally through the hypertextual
reference to other documents (cf. Mitchell, 1992).

Moreover, the deconstruction of the educational
communication process where the Internet is used has profound repercussions
for the status of face-to-face communication, effects of both decentralisation
and revalidation. I will discuss decentralisation later. The revalidation
effect consists in the sharpened perception of the characteristics proper
to the real conversation situation in real space, a sharpened perception made
possible by the experience of its difference from virtual communication in
virtual space. The anaesthetic reduction of communication to the medium of
interactive writing – as takes place in IRC, MUDs and MOOs –also renders the
visual, acoustic and tactile evidence that we subconsciously presuppose in
face-to-face communication the object of conscious deconstruction in the medium
of writing. The appresent presence of participants in online Chat means that
in order to be present at all as a Chat participant, we must describe to the
other participants what we look like, what our voice sounds like, how our
skin feels, in which spaces and times we move, and altogether what kind of
beings and in which kind of world we are. Out of this there arises a deconstructionist
awareness of the body through which we become sensitive in a new way to the
specific gestural and tactile signatures of everyday face-to-face communication
in real space.

The decentralisation effect that arises from the
experience of the inner written signature of our thought, speech and communication
is closely linked with the transformation which affects the third basic assumption of traditional
educational culture. In an Internet-oriented educational culture, the authority
of the teacher is no longer grounded in the authoritative personalisation
of theoretical knowledge stocks in the figure of the omnicompetent teacher.
Instead the authority of the teacher is now grounded in her competence to
use language in a pragmatic way and in her ability to make transparent use of different sources of knowledge,
heterogeneous interpretations and divergent interests. Where the teacher has
these abilities, the integration of the Internet in lessons no longer presents
a problem. On the contrary, teachers who are already prepared to disclose
to learners the sources, contingencies, relativities and openness, as well
as the developing character of their own knowledge in the framework of decentralised
face-to-face lessons will also use the Internet to enter into a shared media-based
learning process with their pupils. The authority of the teacher is preserved
here, above all by helping the learners to learn the art of independent, reflective
and intelligent learning themselves (which is decisive for success in their
own lives). The teacher’s advantage thus no longer consists primarily of possessing
preordained curricular reserves, but rather of the competence to channel the
constantly growing flows of information in an understandable, pragmatic and
cooperative manner, and to transform them, in cooperation with the learners,
into situated knowledge that is useful and beneficial to the learning community.

In Internet conditions, the fourth basic assumption of traditional
educational culture, that knowledge is to be understood as a fixed stock of
hierarchically ordered facts, is replaced by a process concept of knowledge.
The intersubjectively mediated faculty of reflective judgement is central
here. This faculty is comprised of those pragmatic and deconstructionist abilities
whose intelligent interplay is decisive for media competence in the use of
the Internet. In traditional media practice, the spectator or reader can usually
pre-judge the value of an item from its association with a particular publisher,
a particular TV or radio station, or a particular newspaper editor
– that is, to something already known and general. On the Internet,
things are different. Through the use of search machines and work in the various
databases accessible via the Web, users are confronted with a broad spectrum
of quite disparate information in relation to a given keyword. The origin
of the information is not always transparent and its attributability is often
difficult to ascertain. While the classical media system was based on the
development by viewers or readers of stable long-term preferences for programmes
or newspapers that appear trustworthy, on the Internet we have to do with
an information overload. Even with the use of search machines and intelligent
agent programmes, this overload can ultimately only be channelled through
the reflective judgement of the individual user. The comprehensive and systematic
development of reflective judgement at all levels of the population and on
a global scale is the central task for a democratic educational system in
the 21st century.

I would like to conclude by providing two examples
from my own work with the Internet at the universities of Magdeburg and Jena.
Within the framework of a seminar in Magdeburg on ‘Philosophical Media Theory’
that I offered in the summer semester 1996, I stressed the deployment of interactive
communications services like MUDs and MOOs for academic use. We began by reading
a book and an essay by the American media theorist Jay David Bolter of the
Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) in a sequence of four sittings without
computer support. In the course of the reading we worked out questions together,
some straightforward questions of textual understanding, but some too which
problematised Bolter's basic theses. The second seminar sequence took place
in a computer room. Two students sat at each PC, with all the PCs being connected
to the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Media-MOO in which Jay Bolter had
invited us to a discussion. By reference to the communicative situation that
developed, one can demonstrate very well what I mean by a deconstructionist
decentralisation and pragmatic dehierarchialisation of the teaching situation.

The characteristic communicative situation of
the first seminar sequence should first be briefly described. The conversational
situation was structured so that I, as the teacher, worked together with the
students on the development of an open understanding of Bolter’s texts, an
understanding which admitted questions and unclarities. The point was not
to cover up my own problems of understanding, but rather to articulate these
problems as clearly as possible so that students were encouraged by my example
to express their own problems of understanding in the same manner. My function
in the seminar was thus not to present the students with a binding and true
textual understanding for them simply to reproduce. I did not offer them a
standard interpretation, comprehensive and general, with which they would
have been able to subsume the text definitively. Instead, I entered with them
into a targeted process of reflective judgement, in the course of which we
communicated with each other about the uncertainties, different interpretative
possibilities, open questions, manifold references and associations which
turn up in the process of reading an academic text. At the end of this deconstructionist
process, we had a list of questions of understanding and interpretation which
we thought we could not settle amongst ourselves, as well as a second list
of questions which seemed to us to problematise certain of Bolter's basic
ideas. Equipped with these two lists, we began our march into the Internet
and our visit to Bolter’s Media-MOO.

What was interesting above all about the communicative
situation in online discussion with Bolter was that the decentralisation and
dehierarchialisation which had implicitly characterised our work in the computer-free
text-reading sessions, expressed itself in conversation with Bolter as a peculiar
experience of solidarity. In conversation with Bolter we experienced ourselves
as a thinking and reflective community which posed questions, formulated objections,
followed up, changed subject, brought up new problems and so on, in a coordinated
and cooperative manner. The technical boundary conditions contributed to this.
Bolter could only see what we wrote, but we ourselves could communicate orally
at all times to discuss what we were writing and our continued argumentative
procedure, without Bolter hearing. The weak degree of determinacy or, more
positively formulated, the deconstructionist openness which we had allowed
ourselves in the first seminar sequence, now proved to be our strength. The
author, who had been brought back from the anonymous world of the printed
book to the virtual conversational reality of online discussion, could now
be confronted step by step with our specific problems of interpretation and
critical objections. In the transposition from the world of the printed book
to the interactive world of written conversation, the seminar participants
experienced with clarity the way that, in a successful reading, one reflective
judgement leads on to another. Bolter answered those of our questions that
went beyond textual understanding by incorporating them into his own reflections
and thus helped us understand how published knowledge is the momentary take
of an open thought process, a process in which good texts invite their readers
to participate, by thinking for themselves.

I would like to describe my experience of Internet
use in philosophy seminars at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with
the example of a Proseminar on Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics which I led in
the 1999 summer semester. In the framework of this seminar I tried to utilise
the World Wide Web collectively in a targeted way to improve the seminar discussion
and the ability of students to take themselves and their fellow students seriously
as writers, that is, as text authors. The participants prepared themselves
for the respective Aristotelian sequences that were to be dealt with in the
seminar by writing short summaries and comments on the corresponding passages
before the sitting. A week before the relevant sitting, these summaries were
made available to all by publication on a seminar homepage set up for this
purpose (http://www.uni-jena.de/ms/seminar/) so that each participant could
already form an image of the published state of reflection of all their fellow
students before the sitting. The procedure in the seminar was that one participant
then offered a so-called ‘survey-presentation’. These survey presentations
reconstructed and interpreted the Aristotelian text to be thematised and in
so doing incorporated the summaries and comments of the other participants
as secondary literature.

In this way the authors of the summaries and comments
experienced early on what it means to be received and taken seriously as an
author. They sensed, as it were through the example of their own publications,
how a text alienates itself from its author in the medium of publication and
how deconstructionist processes of reflection are necessary to reconstruct
the openness of thought in reading. Through this form of collective writing
and publication, they learned new forms of reflective reading that no longer
apprehend the text as a pregiven general stock of knowledge that is to be
subsumed under a certain heading, but which recognise in the text an instrument
which it is important to learn to use pragmatically and meaningfully by means
of reflective judgement in an open, interactive and participatory intellectual
exercise.

The two examples from my own teaching experience
show that the Internet not only means a great challenge for media theorists
and media educationalists, but also, and precisely, that it can provide creative
impulses to teaching in subjects as seemingly media-independent and withdrawn
as philosophy. In addition, the examples make it clear that in educational
policy, it no longer suffices to acquire new computer technology, set up network
connections and install intelligent educational software. Technical use of
new media is by no means a sufficient condition for the development of reflective
judgement. This false optimism, disseminated by many educational policy makers
today, is based on deterministic asumptions about media. Against this prejudice,
it must of course be emphasised that the targeted development of reflective
judgement has its educational place not only and not primarily in the computer
laboratory or in front of the Internet screen. Rather it begins in the everyday
communication situation of normal, non-computerised face-to-face lessons,
which at the same time as its deconstructionist decentralisation, is pragmatically
revalidated in an educational world shaped by the new media.

The central challenge which current and future
educational policy is confronted with is how the revalidation of face-to-face
classroom practices is to be combined with the reshaping of knowledge promoted
by the emergent information network technologies. Here, I have taken the Internet
as a paradigm to set out the need it presents to revise important basic assumptions
about the nature of knowledge and education, and I have argued that a blend
of deconstruction and pragmatism accounts theoretically for the phenomena
currently emerging. The salient point from the viewpoint of educational policy
is that the Internet is currently our best paradigm for the topology of information
in the future, and that there is every reason to believe that this is just
the tip of the iceberg. History has taught us what fate awaits those who are
too late in identifying and circumnavigating icebergs.

Sandbothe, Mike (1998b), Media Temporalities in the Internet:
Philosophy of Time and Media in Derrida and Rorty, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 4/2, December, Annenberg School of Communication, University
of Southern California, http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/.

1 Cf. here Sandbothe, 2000c;
a shortened version of the text has appeared on-line as Sandbothe, 1998b.
For an introduction to deconstruction see Rorty, 1989b; for an introduction
to (neo)pragmatism see Rorty, 1998.

2 For an account of the prehistory
of pragmatic media philosophy in Peirce, James, Dewey, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein,
see Sandbothe, 1998 as well as Sandbothe, 2000.

3 On the inner differentiation
of the media concept see Sandbothe, 2000 and 2000b.